is a merely mistaken mode of proceeding; because these powers are powers which do not yield to the human beliefs, and the _practical_ doctrine must have respect to them. The great battle of that age--the battle of the second causes, which the new philosophers were compelled to fight in behalf of humanity at the peril of their lives--the battle which they fought in the open field with Aristotle and Plato--fills all this magnificent poetry with its reverberations. It must be confessed, that those terrible appeals to the heavens, into which King Lear launches out in his anguish now and then, are anything but pious; but the boldness which shocks our modern sensibilities becomes less offensive, if we take into account the fact that they are not made to the object of our present religious worship, but are mere vague appeals, and questioning addresses to the unknown, unexplored causes in nature--the powers which lie behind the historical phenomena. For that divine Ideal of Human Nature to which 'our large temples, crowded with the shows of peace,' are built now, had not yet appeared at the date of this history, in that form in which we now worship it, with its triumphant assurance that it came forth from the heart of God, and declared Him. Paul had not yet preached his sermon at Athens, in the age of this supposed King of Britain; and though the author was indeed painting his own age, and not that, it so happened that there was such a heathenish and inhuman, and, as he intimates, indeed, quite '_fiendish_' and diabolical state of things to represent here then, that this discrepancy was not so shocking as it might have been if he had found a divine religion in full operation here. 'If it be you,' says Lear, falling back upon the theory, which Edmund has already discarded, of a divine thrusting on-- 'If it be _you_ that _stir these daughters' hearts_ Against their father, fool _me_ not so much To bear it tamely; _touch me_ with noble anger.'